The Blue Hour
by secondplacechampion
Summary: The Blue Hour is a unique time of day. It creates a soft atmosphere in the moment between the light of day and the dark of night. The moment between inoocence and discovery. And for Carlisle, the moment in his life between his loneliness and his family
1. Chapter 1

I don't own Twilight, as Stephenie Meyer holds that copyright, but this is just to fill in a few blanks... hope she doesn't mind...

Enjoy!

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Never, in his four hundred years of existence, had Carlisle Cullen been surrounded by so much death. He was beyond the point of extreme stress when the irony of that particular sentence would have made him laugh. If anything, it made him wish that he could find a small corner somewhere and sob. He had been in the hospital going on three days now, offering other physicians some relief. Letting them go home to escape this catastrophe for a few precious hours of sleep at a time.

He envied them for their ability to sleep.

The last four days alone he had lost fourteen patients. Sixteen more had come in complaining of the same symptoms as the ones he had lost. Fever, headache, blue tint to the face, and trouble breathing. Once they started to cough up blood, their hope for survival was slim – and that was only what he told the worried family members. He knew that their chance for survival after they started spitting up blood they might as well start putting their affairs in order.

Thinking back, Carlisle could tell you that it was within these few years that he was finally put off from human blood. The once tempting and delicious smelling liquid was suddenly disgusting to him. This blood was rejecting that which it gave life, why would he want it?

"You alright, Cullen?" asked a passing doctor. He finally took view of himself. He was taking to letting a corner hold him up; he was crouching over with his hands over his face. He knew that the silent jerks of his shoulders would look like crying to any average human. He looked up to the doctor, a friend of his actually.

"Yeah, I'm fine Adams," he shook himself together, pretending to wipe his eyes for appearance's sake, "you know, just…"

Adams was a portly, older gentleman, in his late fifties. He had a kind soul and charismatic laugh, and if Carlisle was really the age that he pretended to be, he would have made a perfect father figure for him. In fact, the old man took it upon himself to pull Carlisle under his wing, helping him settle into the medical world. Carlisle did not have the heart to tell him that he had been practicing medicine for a good two hundred years before he was born, and he had a sneaking suspicion that neither did Dr. Adams. For the last year or so that Carlisle had worked here, his heart sounded sluggish and weak, and Carlisle had tried pushing him towards taking care of it, but Dr. Adams would hear nothing of it.

"...how long have you been here, Cullen?"

Quickly doing the math, Carlisle's eyes snapped up to the other man's. He had first come in on Tuesday, when he first heard of a round of patients dying of the same symptoms. Today was Friday. "A few," he lied.

"On top of how many more?"

Carlisle couldn't help but smile. He could always tell when he was lying. "Am I that obvious?"

Dr. Adams took a great breath, pulling off his glasses, he chuckled, and "all first years have trouble pulling away from something they feel they need to fix." He clasped his hand on Carlisle's shoulder, "you've got to learn how to step away. You are not any help to these patients if you are just as dead on your feet as they are."

_You have no idea how right that statement is, Doc._

"You are right," Carlisle began. "I'll go home, take a nap, and come back in a few hours." He did need to hunt anyway; it had been almost five days since his last meal…

"I wouldn't hold it against you if you didn't come back until Monday. You've done your job here. Let other doctors take over for awhile."

"No," he shook his head, "I'm more use here. Besides, this sickness, this flu – it's strange. It affects people in their primes. Not the elderly, not the young, but strong, healthy men and women. I don't understand."

"Maybe a few hours sleep and you'll have a revelation?" Dr. Adams began leading him down a long hallway to the exit. "And don't you dare set an alarm. You come in after a natural sleep cycle, you hear?"

Carlisle nodded as he left Dr. Adams with the mystery disease and left to face the nighttime city streets of Chicago. His throat burned with thirst, but the people on the streets were not appealing to him. They had lost their lure a long time ago.

He walked for a long while, taking in the mixed sounds of horse drawn carriages and new motored cars. Lately, it was more cars than carts. He knew that within the next ten years or so the loud, oil driven machines would rule the road, and he silently knew that he would miss the sound of horse cart wheels on the pebbled streets.

He walked past an old nickelodeon, probably the only one left in Chicago due to the popularity of longer films and movie palaces. They mostly just had news reels anymore. Carlisle made a mental note that if he needed more time to waste before heading back to the hospital, he would go watch a few news stories about the newly entered Great War. He always did love the cheap movie vendors.

He kept walking, past the taller buildings and then past the living districts and the newer outskirt buildings. He was heading toward Bernis Woods, a small preserve west of the city. Not his ideal choice, of course – normally he'd take a train up to Madison where there were less people and stay a day or two, but he couldn't afford to leave for that long. There were people in the hospital that couldn't afford him to take a few days to himself.

The long walk, if he would walk and take his time the whole way, would take him a few hours. He was going to allow himself a few hours to hunt and then the few hours back and then the nickelodeon; he figured that would give him a good ten hours. Ten hours was a perfectly respectable amount of time to take a nap for a doctor of his age.

Thinking about his walk, he figured himself stupid for choosing a city so far away from compatible hunting grounds. For him, at least. He could run, full speed, to the preserve if he needed to, and be there in minutes, but it was a small area and surrounded with population and the chance of getting caught. He knew of a few fellow vampires that lived in the city, following the more…traditional lifestyle. But, with his diet, he needed to be in the country, a place more rural, in … in Ohio.

He laughed at himself, for what was running in his thoughts. He really was messed up. He ran a hand through his hair as he paused his journey towards diner and leaned against a brick building. If his time in Italy with the Volturi had told him anything, it was that he was a freak among freaks. He had always had an aversion to human blood. From the beginning, he had a fear of taking life, and even when faced with an easy kill, surrounded by powerful vampires that were persuading him to drink, he couldn't do it. He couldn't kill.

Honestly, he couldn't be the only one that felt this way, could he? Surely, he wasn't doomed to an existence of confliction, of solitude. A man passed him, carrying a small boy on his shoulder, the child looked about three or four and about to fall asleep. He opened his eyes long enough to look Carlisle straight in the eye – his large green eyes hazy with sleep – and to smile, before he laid his head down and slept. Like a knife to the stomach, Carlisle was suddenly reminded of his extreme loneliness. For decades he had wished to find others like him. As his search became exceedingly more fruitless, he began turning the idea in his head that he should turn someone.

Actually, he could pinpoint the exact moment of when he thought of turning someone down to the year, date, and time of day.

It was in 1911, on the ninth of September, in the middle of a cloudy afternoon. He was living in Pickford, Ohio – a small town outside of Columbus. It was like any other day at the hospital, and she was just another patient.

Until he went into her room to treat her, tears running down her face, leaves and dirt in her hair and covering her blue dress. She could not have been more than sixteen, with long brown hair. Her mother was standing over her, a tense look on her face, even intimidating Carlisle for a moment. She has a broken leg, nothing a resetting and a cast wouldn't fix, but obviously – however she received such a break was not looked highly upon by her mother.

She was fighting back sobs by biting her lower lip when he first walked in, "well, hello."

"Hi," she said, with a very small voice, her head hung.

He looked down at her chart, "Esme Platt, right?"

She nodded.

"That's a beautiful name."

Her mother crossed her arms and switched her weight to her left hip.

"So, how did you break your leg?" He sat down his chart and started to feel how bad of break it really was.

"I was climbing a tree." Her mother shifted her weight again. "And then the limb broke, thank goodness I wasn't any higher than where I was." Despite the pain he knew she was in, there was distinct sparkle in her eyes. He liked that.

"How far up were you?"

"A good fifteen feet, I had a pretty good view of the country side from where I was."

Carlisle could have smiled, and then he felt the break and the girl stiffened.

"Owe, owe, owe!" she exclaimed and snapped her eyes up to his.

"Sorry…" he tried to sooth, and began to say more, but he was temporally lost in her brown eyes. "I hope the view was worth it…" he grinned.

"It is." Her face jolted, "was. It was." She corrected. Her mother let out a small cough.

Carlisle had a small laugh at the situation, "um, it's nothing really bad, it feels like a classic break, but I want to make sure." He grabbed the chart again, and his pen. "Actually, I should be thanking you for falling, Miss Platt. You get to be the first patient to use the new X-ray machine."

"X-Ray? The bone camera?"

He grinned again, "yeah, that is the other name for it."

"Is that safe?" her mother asked, concerned.

"Yes. The procedure is actually very simple, and only takes a few minutes to complete."

"I wanna do it," Esme declared before her mother had a chance to challenge it again. "It sounds exciting."

"Well, alright, I come back in a few moments, then." He heard his accent slip through his speech, and cursed himself as he walked through her door. That only happened when he was nervous. She was only sixteen, and he was technically too old for her. But she was beautiful, and daring, and brave. He knew that he would like her if he got to spend more time with her…

But he was a vampire, she was a human. It could not happen.

But she got him thinking, and in the next few months, during her follow-up appointments and his one house call, he got to know her better, and began wishing she were older so he could steal her from her life that she seemed to hate. The life she had been imprisoned in.

He couldn't help but be captivated by her, and he couldn't help but notice she had begun to have a crush on him. Her mother noticed as well, and the day her cast came off was the last day he held a conversation with her.

But he followed her life, she went to public school, had the average American life. He watched her grow from a beautiful young lady to an amazing woman. To say he was smitten with her was an understatement. He was going to go to her parents and ask to court her when she turned twenty (he had no clue as to how he was going to go about doing said dating but wanted to try anyway), but when WWI broke out in Europe, her father wanted her to marry. He claimed that it was just good planning in case America ever entered. She consented, and Carlisle's heart broke in ways he didn't think it was capable of anymore.

He fled to Chicago and started over.

He tried to convince himself that it was all for the best, but the loneliness never left him. He may have felt like a creepy stalker, but those four years following Esme's life, he had a plan and a hope for the future. Now all he had was himself and dark streets and long walks to unfulfilling dinners. He felt the hopelessness wash over him again as he gasped for air he didn't need.

Was he really the only one that felt like this?

Was he really destined to be alone?

Was he really meant to be here at all?

All these questions were heavy on his mind, filling over his chest, and he dry heaved – because he hadn't eaten in days. A woman walking paused and started to help, but then got a better look, and thought the better of it and her pace quickened. The sound of her heels on the pavement crowded his ears. He couldn't bear this anymore…

He took off running.

Twelve hours later, he was back in the hospital, throwing himself into his patients and trying to forget his despair. It was during this shift that led him to the rest of his life, to a man that lay dying and his wife and a son that would change the course of his world for the rest of forever.

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There is more, as I want to go into the next few years of the Cullen's life, but I figured 2,500ish words was plenty for a first chapter. Hope you liked it, and let me know if you did!


	2. Chapter 2

Enjoy!

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Edward Masen was in bad shape. He was a patient that had shown up a few days ago, but Carlisle hadn't dealt with him. He was another doctor's patient, but that doctor was currently taking a few hours of sleep and the patient was passed off to Carlisle. From the looks of the chart, Carlisle estimated that he had the weekend, maybe Monday if he was strong enough.

He really wasn't looking forward to letting another family that they were about to lose someone. He didn't know if he could take much more of this.

He walked the white hallway to where the families were sitting, three dozen faces all turned, sad and deep wrinkled with worry turned to him, wishing that he was there for them and praying he had good news. He hated the waiting area for this reason.

"Masen?" he called. Almost three dozen heads fell, and a large sigh filled the room. Everyone prayed for the best, prepared for the worst. Two heads however, stayed on him. A woman, early – maybe mid thirties and a young man both with bronze hair. Their faces nearly killed him. "Can I speak with you?"

They stood, gathering themselves; it looked as though the boy was carrying his mother.

"It's this epidemic, isn't it?" the mother asked as she reached him, invading his personal space. "Everyone knows it, I mean, look at Europe. It's this damned war. Brought it here."

"Mother…" The boy pleaded. Obviously, this wasn't the first time she had tiraded on like this. Carlisle was thankful for the boy's insight; he didn't know how to respond to the woman. He nodded to the boy, who smiled and nodded back. His eyes were green and Carlisle was pulled back to the street where he just recently had a small panic attack. It took a beat for him to settle himself.

"Your husband appears to have caught the same virus that is … rumored to be an epidemic," he took a deep breath, and then regretted it. He tasted all of these people's tears in the air and was distracted. "Um… he's in one of the last stages of the … virus. I regret to inform you that he probably doesn't have much time left."

As the words left his mouth, the woman crumbled, the boy didn't seem to falter as he caught his mother. "Can we see him?" he asked.

At this Carlisle was unsure of how to respond. On one hand, he hated denying people of their last few moments with their loved ones; on the other hand, they were still unsure as to how the disease was spread. Seeing the woman fall apart, and adding that to his break down earlier, "of course. This way."

He led them into the room where there were at least two dozen patients with the same problem were being held, and went to tend to other patients. When he came back, the boy was sitting against the wall outside the door. Head in his hands.

Carlisle slid down the wall next to him, "sorry I gave you such bad news."

The boy didn't say anything.

"Do you have any brothers or sisters?"

He shook his head. Silently, Carlisle was relieved. "I know what you are thinking," the boy said suddenly. He looked up to the older man, looking much older than the sixteen or seventeen he had to be. " 'Thank goodness.' "

"Something like that," Carlisle confirmed. The boy returned his head to his hands.

Carlisle didn't know why he was sitting here; next to a boy that needed comfort that he didn't know how to give. He was about to get up when he spoke again.

"Have you seen it in my mother, yet?"

"What?"

"The sickness. I've seen it before, the maid in our house died from it earlier this week. And now my father…" he trailed. Sitting up straight, he took in a deep breath to steady himself. Carlisle was suddenly jealous. "She's been holding her head like when she has a headache. And she's been really cold and it's only early summer. This morning when we first brought dad, she was sweating. She hasn't said anything though, but it's not for my benefit or anything. She thinks that by ignoring it, she won't catch it." He looked the doctor in the eye.

Carlisle waited for him to continue, it felt like he wasn't done.

"My father is lying in there dying," he swallowed, and his hands shook. "My mother is standing in there, and she's dying. She's not going to want to, but you need to help her, please?"

For a moment, Carlisle thought he was looking in a mirror. The fear, the loneliness, the despair was all there, in this young man's face.

"What's your name?"

"Edward." He laughed, "after my father." And then he took a shaky breath and he started to cry.

"Edward, I'll do what I can. I understand what kind of fear you are going through. What you must feel at the moment."

"Thank you," he looked at him for a moment with wet eyes, "have you lost someone to all of this?"

Carlisle nodded, his face serious, "too many."

Edward was still. The vampire was worried he had said the wrong thing.

"You're a good doctor. You may not think that because of what's happened, but you are." He wiped at his nose, "you're very compassionate."

"You are very perceptive."

"So I've been told."

Standing up, Carlisle said one last thing to Edward, "That's a true gift; one I hope you never lose."

Edward grinned through his fear, and Carlisle had his sights back on work.

* * *

By three that afternoon, Carlisle had convinced Mrs. Masen to be checked. By seven o'clock, Mr. and Mrs. Masen were laying next to each other. By seven-thirty, Edward had come to terms with the fact that the waiting room would become his home for the next few days.

It was ten o'clock that evening when Carlisle lost another patient, barging out into the hallway kicking a hole into the wall. She was only twenty six, the same age as he would be if he were living. She had a small child, and everything to live for.

It wasn't fair.

All the people he had lost today, all the lives that he had so desperately fought for, they were all young. Men and women in their twenties. Newlyweds, new mothers, fathers. Not for the first time in the last week did our frustrated doctor wish he could cry.

He would live forever. Exist alongside eternity, outside of death. He was stuck in a constant present. Never to grow, never to die, never to be a father, and never to live. These people, these innocent lives, they could.

And he couldn't do anything for them.

It wasn't fair.

The loneliness was creeping back to surround him, making him feel colder than he had in centuries.

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If you still like it, let me know!


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